Insydeh20 Error Invalid Firmware Image
Madeleine Harrier
I have a laptop (Inspiron 15-3521) that is a little less than 2 yrs old. I've been having some problems with the monitor - flickering one and one every once in a while, when I first open it up. No problems other than that. I've been meaning to open it up and reseat the LCD cord.
In any way, last night, when I pushed the power button to turn it on, there was a little static charge. It didn't turn on, so I repeated a few times (pressing power button on), and after a few minutes, it worked and turned on. Today, I just tried turning it on, and it's not turning on at all. There are four lights - power, battery charging, something else, and wi-fi lights - and the power light comes on for a second when I press the power button, then it turns off. I also hear a faint noise, like something turning inside the laptop and then dying. If I plug it in, the battery charging light comes on. No other lights will turn on.
Sometimes even a loose memory module can cause this issue on few system. Check this link - - manual for the system - try reseating the memory modules or try one module at a time to isolate a possibly faulty memory module.
Before trying the memory module reseating, I just tried again, and it turned on after a few tries. Now that it's actually turned on and running, is there anything I can do to try to figure out what the problem is?
Once I turned off the system to reboot, it took me about 20x of hitting the power button for it to finally boot up. I ran the diagnostics, and it finished pretty quickly (saying everything was fine) and asked if I wanted to run the extended test (I think it was the memory test), which was recommended, so I said yes. It's been running for about 2 hours now. It was stuck at 96% for a while, and now it's stuck at 98% and has been for a very long time. Still running. Everything has a green check next to it except for "Hard Drive 0".
I haven't updated the BIOS yet - I was going to do that after the diagnostics ran. Should I keep it going or abort the test, since it's been stuck for an hour in one place? Does this tell you anything more about what's wrong?
The diagnostic test finally finished, and I got a message saying there were no errors. I updated the BIOS. I restarted, and it took a long time to restart - I had to push the power button 51 times this time! In any case, it started booting up, and now i'm getting an error message in a blue box that says "InsydeH20 - Secure Flash. Error: Invalid firmware image!!!! Please press any key to rest system......"
I'm guessing from what I found out about the InsydeH20 error that the BIOS update didn't work. In any event, I did reseat the memory module (there is only one in my laptop), and I'm still having to press the power button multiple times to get it to start. I noticed that I may have gotten a Trojan virus (random pop-up ads even when I don't have any browser open). Could that be doing this?
If the system is under warranty, then please send me the service tag of the system and your contact details through a private conversation. Or you could use twitter - @dellcares - we can DM through twitter and help you fix the issue.
By the way, in the process of reseating the memory module, I also opened up the laptop and reseated the LCD cable, and that seems to have fixed the problem of the screen blinking every once in a while.
It can take 30 secs to see the DELL logo up to 2-3 hours... YES up to 2 or 3 hours before the DELL logo appears. In average I would say 25 to 45 mins before the DELL logo appears. After when the DELL logo appears it boots correctly in Windows 10 and the laptop does not look to have any performance issues.
I tried the bios from your link. I already had downloaded the same from DELL and I have the same results. Below you have the screen images that I took. It always asks me if I want to downgrade ?!?! If I say Y or N I always have the same result... invalid firmware. I was able to download from the DELL website version A08 of the BIOS and it asks me if I want to replace A08 (Inspirion 5537) with A08 (Inspirion 5537) and again after a couple of minutes (30 in average) I get the same blue message.
I am having problems installing the Ubuntu on my device. My Acer Aspire 3 A315-23-R4B9 laptop apparently has problems with support for Linux systems, but I hope that this can be fixed. When starting from the USB drive, Ubuntu always hangs on the Splash boot screen.
I disabled all possible items in the BIOS, tried different ISO images, but all to no avail. The Ubuntu installation comes to boot and freezes on the Acer splash screen. I think that the problem is in the drivers that are not in the Ubuntu kernel for my hardware.
Ok guys, I have good news (or not). I just decided to boot with the ssd drive of my laptop disabled, namely in the Advanced tab in the BIOS, in the Storage Device Configuration I disabled HDD1 and Live USB Ubuntu booted without problems, I checked all the functions and absolutely all the sound works, adjusting the brightness of the screen keyboard touchpad and etc. no errors, everything is in order with the drivers. It turns out it's only about my SSD, but when it is disabled in the BIOS, I certainly cannot install anything and this is a problem that I did not solve.
I bought A315-23 laptop a few days back, and stumbled upon the same problem. Long story short, solution is to set nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 kernel option at boot. Then installation works out-of-box. After installing the same option needs to be added to grub (edit /etc/default/grub followed with update-grub).
Longer story, how I found solution: As described, we both can initiate a boot but a hang happens along the way. I had little hope the problem being connected to UEFI, still tried to play a little with fast-boot and secure-boot options without success. Given Egor reported system boots correctly after disabling SSD (which was an excellent hint), I tried to follow this path. The laptop has WD 2018/PC SN520 NVMe SSD. I found a suggestion how to fix the problem at -support-for-wd-black-nvme-2018/225446/7.
Acer machines appear to all have boot code which automatically looks for a Windows boot directory. I've found you can fool them into thinking they're running Windows, whereas they're actually running Ubuntu simply by a directory copy & one file rename.
Boot from installation USB & install Ubuntu (given choices I prefer to scrub the whole of the hard drive and do minimal install). At this point you'll probably find you get boot fails if you try to re-boot from hard drive
Warning: You may need to run through steps 3) & 4) again if the boot directory changes in the future, but this can be done without loss of data or any need to re-install Ubuntu. This happened to me once in last 4 years.
In some laptops I found problems booting with USB 3, and I had to use USB 2.0.In some others, I had problems booting with all USB sticks but I had not problems booting from a USB DVD player/recorder, so that's the last resource, to toast one DVD with the ISO and boot from an external USB DVD drive.
Also the last line of your screenshot said that the job have been running for 14 seconds of a max of 3 minutes. Can you provide a screenshot of the final outcome, after having waited at least 5 minutes?.
Remove the drives from those machines. Place your target drive in the non-problematic machine and complete your install (without secure boot or any type of security). Put it back in your troublesome laptop and boot it up.
Caveat.... Now, I will say... my experience(with that UEFI) when I WAS able to install in legacy mode, the install finished, but the boot problems were plentiful... So I worked until I figured out the nuances of the UEFI(like i mentioned in the comments)... So their may be a chance that even when you get your drive installed and working on the other machine, you may very well have the same issue of being able to boot.
I wish I could offer more, but without seeing all the options on your UEFI and how they react with each other, it's hard to say which way to go. There seem to be a lot of googling of "insydeh20 no legacy boot" with mixed results... I'd still try some of those solutions first. They may lead you to the proper answer.... But, anytime I have been defeated by UEFI/BIOS/LEGACY/SECURE/ETC problems, I have had success doing the solution that I suggested above.
I noticed on your security screen that "Secure Boot" was still enabled, although you said you disabled it. Some BIOS have a constraint that "Secure Boot" cannot be disabled unless the supervisor password is set.
Therefore, you could try setting the supervisor password and then disable secure boot. If it still doesn't work, check that the secure boot is still disabled. If it isn't disabled, try "Erase all secure boot setting" and disable secure boot again. (You can always reset the default secure boot settings, so the action shouldn't be irrevocable.)
i think i had same problem too, it may be about you system support only efi boot, or legacy boot, and you try to boot legacy on a efi.try booting in efi mode, changing the bios boot to efi and disable legacy mode. if that dont work try to enable legacy mode, and boot without efi..
Firstly please get a udev log by editing the line in your grub config. During boot up grub would allow you to edit the boot command (probably with Tab). Add udev.log_priority=debug to boot config and boot using the key displayed. (Usually enter if not displayed. Else try c).
Disclaimer: Don't blindly follow this "guide", bricking your BIOS is easy, recovering it is not.IntroductionA quick Google query will return tons of results for modded BIOSes for laptops that unlock additional advanced and dangerous options like "Advanced" and "Power" tabs.But how do they do it - and more importantly - how can we do it ourselves?The problem with these modded BIOS ROMs is that you have to flash them, oftentimes with an external programmer due to the BIOS image region being locked or the manufacturer updaters having a checksum which doesn't allow flashing custom images.Note: Most of this article assumes the use of LinuxDumping the BIOS ROMOn my Dell Inspiron 3537, flashrom detects the following:/tmp/BIOS # flashrom -p internal[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]Found chipset "Intel Lynx Point LP Premium".[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]Enabling flash write... Warning: BIOS region SMM protection is enabled!Warning: Setting Bios Control at 0xdc from 0x22 to 0x01 failed.New value is 0x22.SPI Configuration is locked down.FREG0: Flash Descriptor region (0x00000000-0x00000fff) is read-only.FREG2: Management Engine region (0x00001000-0x003fffff) is locked.Not all flash regions are freely accessible by flashrom. This is most likelydue to an active ME. Please see for details.PR0: Warning: 0x00700000-0x007fffff is read-only.PR1: Warning: 0x00402000-0x006a1fff is read-only.At least some flash regions are read protected. You have to use a flashlayout and include only accessible regions. For write operations, you'lladditionally need the --noverify-all switch. See manpage for more details.PROBLEMS, continuing anywayFound Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.No operations were specified.As we can see, there is an internal programmer but due to the Intel Management Engine being active, we can't dump the whole ROM./tmp/BIOS # flashrom -p internal -r bios.bin[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]At least some flash regions are read protected. You have to use a flashlayout and include only accessible regions. For write operations, you'lladditionally need the --noverify-all switch. See manpage for more details.PROBLEMS, continuing anywayFound Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.Reading flash... Transaction error!Read operation failed!FAILED.It turns out that 0x00000000-0x00000fff is the Flash Descriptor and 0x00001000-0x003fffff is the Intel ME region, flashrom attemps to dump the whole ROM but due to the locked (read-protected) region of the Intel ME this is not possible.To dump the other regions we could use a ROM layout description file:/tmp/BIOS # cat rom.layout00000000:00000fff fdr00001000:003fffff me0x00700000:0x007fffff pr00x00402000:0x006a1fff pr1Which allows us to specify the exact region flashrom should operate on:/tmp/BIOS # flashrom -p internal -l rom.layout --image pr0 -r bios.bin[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]PROBLEMS, continuing anywayFound Winbond flash chip "W25Q64.V" (8192 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address 0x00000000ff800000.Reading flash... done.We can use this to dump pr0 and pr1 which is usually most of the BIOS (without Intel ME).Sadly, this can't be used to generate a full backup (yet...) but is still nice to have.Extracting a full ROM from BIOS upgradesI have only tried this for my specific BIOS, so the steps for yours might differ. Consider the following section Dell-only.Download the BIOS upgrade of your choice (in this case Inspiron_3537_A09.exe).We will use the script from here to extract the different sections.This allows us to split the executable into sections:/tmp/BIOS/ $ ./splitter.py -f Inspiron_3537_A09.exeWhich leaves us with this:/tmp/BIOS/Inspiron_3537_A09 $ ls -lhtotal 13M-rw-r--r-- 1 rafael rafael 1.5M Feb 13 18:39 five-rw-r--r-- 1 rafael rafael 65K Feb 13 18:39 four-rw-r--r-- 1 rafael rafael 2.5M Feb 13 18:39 one-rw-r--r-- 1 rafael rafael 8.1M Feb 13 18:39 three-rw-r--r-- 1 rafael rafael 125K Feb 13 18:39 twoPartDescriptiononeMS-DOS Executable, CWSDPMI, bundles a flash tool that communicates to the DPMI hosttwoMS-DOS Executable, has references to FlashSecureBIOSOverridethreeIntel serial flash for PCH ROMfourConfiguration file (.ini)fiveIntel GbE image(?)Hidden BIOS settingsSo how do we access the hidden menus and whatnot? We would first need to reverse engineer the whole BIOS update procedure to disable the BIOS Write Lock, and only then can we experiment with our own modified BIOS.But why bother with any of that.UEFI Variable StorageIf you ever wondered how userspace tools change the UEFI bootloader settings - like the boot order - then efivars is the answer. UEFI stores most of the settings in its NVRAM storage - which can be mounted at runtime - and looks like this:/sys/firmware/efi/efivars # ls[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]Boot0000-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8cBoot0001-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8cBoot0002-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]db-d719b2cb-3d3a-4596-a3bc-dad00e67656fdbDefault-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8cKEK-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8cPK-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8cPKDefault-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c[OMITTED FOR LENGTH]Setup-a04a27f4-df00-4d42-b552-39511302113dRandom descriptions:NameDescriptionBoot*Boot entrydbSignature DatabaseKEKKey Exchange Key Signature Database.PKpublic Platform KeyPKDefaultOEM's default public Platform KeyYou might have noticed a rather interestingly named variable called Setup that isn't included in the table. Note its UUID as we will come to it later.Peeking inside the BIOS imageGrab yourself a build of UEFITool (you won't need UEFIExtract and UEFIFind).Now let's try loading the BIOS image (the one named three of the extracted ones) into it:
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